Housing Inc.: a Global Takeover and Our Fight for Home

by Leilani Farha (2026)

Review by Tere Mahoney

Reading Leilani Farha’s Housing Inc. was a powerful experience for me, in a way I did not expect. It could so easily have been a book about the mechanics, policy and history behind our eroding housing system in Canada. Don’t get me wrong—it is about that too. But more importantly for me it is a book that elegantly illuminates the more foundational, pragmatic concept of “home.” It is about our collective need for a stable place to live, through which to realize our hopes and dreams. It is about how we move through the world in all its chaos and beauty. In truth, home is about how we realize our very dignity, identity and existence as human beings—and how this is being destroyed. Home runs so deep in us, those of us from privileged backgrounds often cannot fully fathom what existing without one does to a person.

Housing is a human right. It is a requirement for human existence. Farha says, “Violations of the right to housing are among the most widespread human rights abuses on earth, so routine they have been absorbed into our landscapes as though they are natural. The human right to housing has not been implemented in any meaningful way, anywhere.” Worse, the cognitive dissonance and antipathy of governments, banks and financial firms (often under the guise of being “landlords”) have created a crisis-by-design, one that is disconnected from housing itself, but uses housing as a platform to make decisions that “...rake in profits and fill offshore bank accounts” at the expense of humanity. This small group of individuals’ indifference goes undisguised, and no one holds them to account. Why not? Because the rest of us are not in a habit of challenging such arrogance when we live inside a capitalist experiment which, like the air we breathe to survive, we don’t question.

Investors glibly say out loud, with no remorse or understanding, the underlying premise of this experiment: shareholders matter more than the “...physical displacement and psychological alienation [of people] based on income, ethnic origin, race, identity, marital status, ability, or some combination of these.” To provide an example of how wide the chasm is between the reality of housing as a basic human right, and its bastardization in the hands of neoliberal polarization, privatization, rentier capital and corporatism, in 2022 Farha attended a round table of executives from Canada’s largest apartment building companies. She did so in her former role as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing. There, she listened as these executives spoke openly of their “fiduciary duty” to shareholders and saw their role only as “...providing decent rental accommodations at market rates [but] never acknowledged that by raising rents they [not some abstract economic drivers, floating around in outer space] were creating market rates that their tenants couldn’t afford....Financial firms, they said, are not social services.” It is disturbing to read how normalized these views have become! How we share our collective society with those few elites whose sole-stated intent is to make money, even if it means doing so off other people’s misery.

The bridge between such sentiments and their impact in real time, on real people, is clarified through reading Farha’s book. In short, what comes through starkly is how the deliberate housing crisis is intrinsically linked to poverty. On a high-level, this is because the folks being marginalized by this type of minority-mindset are the same majority of folks who are denied access to this sector’s assets: the income and/or wealth it takes to become a “landlord,” or even just the ability to become a simple property-owner (and thus walk among this class of individuals believing they have somehow earned this right). Yet even explaining the disconnect this way, I make the cruelty directed at the poor and marginalized sound benign. I encourage you to read Housing Inc. for yourself, to discover the more insidious, intentional and nefarious ways this mindset takes hold in our society. For instance, the ways in which it is “...doing more than promoting economic efficiency: They [the rentier class, the financial firms, the developers, the government] are engineering who matters and who doesn’t.” Be prepared for a shock, if you have not experienced the stigma of being unhoused yourself.

Which brings me back to my opening statement: what I did not expect to discover in Farha’s words. The book made my heart soar. I had not heard anyone else describe, with such eloquence, the necessity of “dwelling” to the human experience. It renewed my hope in the same humanity that has literally built (with bricks, mortar, canvas, skins and even cardboard! anything on hand that will suffice) our legacy of home throughout history, from our earliest iterations as human beings, to our inherent, millennial-old understanding of the interconnectedness of all things. In the final reckoning, we all care about home.

This was the same key message we carried to participants of our Calgary Poverty Reduction Initiative (CPRI) in 2012-15: how poverty and/or homelessness can happen to anyone. Anyone. None of us are immune. We are all vulnerable. Becoming one of the army of unhoused in this country, or falling into poverty, can happen to anyone, even people like you, even people like me. All that is required is one outside shock. An illness in the family. A job loss. A divorce. A domestic violence incident (mine). A financial collapse. A climate crisis. A mental health crisis. A war. A genocide. In the same way our vulnerability makes us One, our collective humanity in the face of greed is our best chance for moving forward. Knowing this feels important, because when we begin to see how we each have a vested interest in reversing this crisis—for everyone—then hope can arise. And in the end, really, that’s all we are: we are each other’s greatest hope.

If this short summary has intrigued you, please watch Leilani’s award-winning documentary PUSH (by Swedish director Fredrik Gertten, 2018), as filmmakers follow her around the globe, trying to understand who’s being pushed out of the city and why, “...this is not gentrification,” she explains, “It’s a different kind of monster.”

Also, listen to Leilani discuss the housing crisis as CBC’s 2026 Massey Lecturer, on your favourite podcast provider.